Email marketing drives sales by building a list you actually own and nurturing it with regular, useful emails until the people on it are ready to buy. Social media gets you noticed. Email is where the quiet selling happens, on a channel no algorithm can switch off. When done properly, it returns between $36 and $42 for every $1 spent, the highest return of any digital channel.

That said, when it comes to email marketing activity there are still the non-believers out there. When I suggest it to them they say things like ‘Yeah, but does email marketing work? (The answer I want to give is yes – or I wouldn’t have brought it up!), or “Yeah, I’m not sure email marketing’s for us.” (This one’s from a business that will happily spend three hours on a reel that reaches forty people.) These conversations are why this article exists.

Email marketing is something we’ve always encouraged clients to do as it’s massively effective. Reaching your database in their inboxes is powerful and worth leveraging. It’s for every business, and there really are no two ways around it.

What do the email marketing stats actually say?

There are no end of articles out there sharing stats that support and defend email marketing as an activity. Here are the few that actually matter, as of July 2026:

Email returns roughly $36 to $42 for every $1 spent, the best of any digital marketing channel by a distance.

Litmus

60% of people say they’d rather be contacted by a brand over email than anywhere else

Optin Monster

81% of small businesses lean on email as their main way to win new customers, and 80% to keep the ones they’ve got

Market Us

Around 4.6 billion people use email in 2025, heading past 4.8 billion by 2027

Statista

59% of consumers say a marketing email has led them to make a purchase

Forbes

Notice not a single one of those is a vanity number. They’re about money changing hands.

Here’s the bit small business owners miss. From the moment an email address lands in your CRM, your spreadsheet, or wherever you keep it (please don’t tell me it’s an Excel spreadsheet!), it starts to go cold. You keep them warm by turning up in their inbox on a regular basis. And it’s content that adds value you should be sending, not just sales pitch after sales pitch.

Regular means weekly or monthly for most businesses, matched to how much you’ve genuinely got worth saying. This all starts with social media doing its job, which is turning followers into subscribers you own, the same principle behind turning social media engagement into sales.

How email marketing creates sales

People rarely buy on the first hello. B2B buyers typically work through three to five pieces of your content before they act, and email is the channel that keeps you in the room between those touches. Not twelve identical emails. A mix. A bit of social, the odd call, and email doing the steady work in the middle.

Here’s how to make email actually create sales, rather than just fill inboxes:

• Build the list on purpose. Every piece of social content should give someone a reason to hand over their email.
• Send something worth opening. Value first, offer second. A rough 80/20 split: mostly useful, occasionally selling.
• Show up on a rhythm. Weekly or monthly, so people come to expect you rather than forget you.
• Follow up automatically. Automated emails drive around 37% of all email sales from a tiny fraction of the sends (Litmus). Set the sequence once and let it earn its keep.

What results can you expect from email marketing?

When it comes to measuring results, stop measuring the success of an email in pounds and pence. Instead, think about delivery rates, open rates, click rates, bounces, and unsubscribes. For example…

• Most emails delivered, very few bounces. Your data is good and healthy.
• A high open rate. Your subject line did its job and earned the attention.
• Clicks. People taking action, which is the whole point. Your content and your call to action worked.
• Barely any unsubscribes. It was relevant to the people who opened it, and nobody felt moved to get rid of you.

Open rates swing a lot by sector, anywhere from the low 20s to the low 40s percent depending on your industry (MailerLite’s 2025 benchmarks). Check what’s normal for your world rather than panicking at someone else’s average. Most email platforms, Mailchimp included, publish an industry benchmark report worth a look.

If you want to go deeper on the mechanics of a campaign that performs, we’ve pulled the proven email marketing techniques into one place

So, does email marketing work?

You’ll always hear a resounding “Hell Yeah” from me on this one. There’s a caveat, though. You must give value, and you must be patient. You can’t send a single email, get zero sales, and decide it doesn’t work for your business. Treat it as a campaign. People need to expect to hear from you, and you need a follow-up system sitting behind it.

A follow-up system means working out who needs a nudge by email or phone, and being honest about whether the last email actually landed, and how the next one could be better.

So, what’s your answer? Go and look at your last campaign, or at the quiet fact that you haven’t sent one in three months. Then send one this week. Not a pitch. Something your list will be glad to open. That’s where the sales start.

Stop Hiding – Start Marketing is out now. It’s the practical, honest guide to showing up for your business and being seen doing it, email and all. Every copy includes access to the Show Up Vault, the full library of templates, prompts and workbooks that go alongside it. Grab your copy.

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